Sunday, June 24, 2012

15mm WW2 European Terrain

I've been beefing up my 15mm WW2, both individually based models and Flames of War based models. As I've mentioned, I'm enjoying the scale immensely, and have turned the corner with FoW. So in order to enjoy games in this scale, I need terrain.

A lot of the guys I game with have excellent terrain collections in both 28mm and 15mm. So historically I haven't had to worry about playing on a table where cat toys represent trees and a pile of books is a hill. But, at least in 15mm, their collections are limited to desert landscapes and buildings. So here's my opening to contribute something new to the battlefield landscapes.

I'm building up European themed terrain in 15mm. JR Miniatures recently had a 20% off sale, and I picked up a bunch of stuff. Combined with pieces I already own, I now have the basis for a bombed out European town. Let's have a look at a sample layout.

Here's a quick arrangement I made for taking pictures. I've got detail shots to follow. This is roughly 4x3 area.

The JR Miniatures stuff includes 4 ruins, a concrete bunker, and six stone fences. I still have some high stone walls and a stone bridge to paint up, and they are not shown here. Additionally, there are blast craters from Rebel Minis, escarpments and rural roads from Gale Force 9, and my favorite Woodland Scenics trees. All together it makes a nice setting. Now here are some close ups.

This is a nice ruined house. But what the hell is going on with the base? It's so flipping thick! The house itself is also a small for 15mm figures. You can stick a small FoW base in it, but the guys look huge. Oh well.

The Sherman tanks come rolling into town, passing the devastation along the road.

Both the green and blue buildings scale OK with figures. The second floor of the blue building is out of scale with the bottom floor. The blue building has a removable top floor to place units inside. But the floor is so tightly fit, it may as well be permanent.

Here we have some US riflemen checking out the intersection and investigating the abandoned bunker and ruined cabin.

The bunker has a removable top and you can place a good number of models inside, or one medium FoW base. Here's the riflemen inside the bunker.

Overall I'm very happy with this collection. It's a good start. I'd like additional buildings and will probably go back to JR Miniatures for more. But I also need to beef up standard terrain like hills and trees.While I have a number of hills, they are more like cliffs and they're painted in desert schemes. I'll have to fix that. I also own the Gale Force 9 river system and swamps. So I can fill a table with terrain. I'd just like more buildings.

That's it for now. I'll be getting back to painting figures this week, once I finish the bridge and other walls.